Icon Realizes the Full Potential of Land Rover Defender via V8 Swap

The Land Rover Defender gets much love from people for many very different reasons. For some it’s one step up from a farm tractor and inherently used as such, while others acknowledge the draw and potential its square shape has and see it as a fashion accessory – most modern Landy-lovers probably find themselves in the middle, but not the unknown customer who ordered the vehicle you see here from Icon.

So much detail and reengineering work went into this metallic/matte/mica black-finished example that it’s probably a big departure from any Defenders you may have driven before.

In fact, by the looks of it, so much painstaking work has been put into this, that the V8 swap is not the most impressive thing, nor is it the custom suspension or obvious performance gain. A lot of machining and designing went into the creation of the interior, which is completely unique to this vehicle and is of high quality – like the one Kahn did, but completely different at the same time.

Check it out in extreme detail in the video below, narrated by its creator (and the founder of Icon) Jonathan Ward.